Tracking its upwards course was effortless: the furrows hewed by it bulk and the bark scraped from the trunks blazed a trail for blind men. The slope, mild at first, inclined quickly, and under the glow of their lanterns and the dappling moonlight the great divots clawed by its mole-like nails grew in number and depth. Gradually it had made its way uphill through the orange needles and the dead lower branches of towering white pines.
As they crested the hill, the volume of the waves increased. The trail vanished. Frantically Grosvenor waved his lantern high, worried their quarry might have escaped into subterranean safety before entering its throes.
And then they noted the slope below them, where the ground leveled flat before descending again toward the Sound. In the flashing beams, they saw the earth torn and loose, and in its center, surrounded by a berm like a crater, lay a dozen melon-sized globes with speckled shells.
There was no intimation of where their creator had gone.
“I had expected them to be buried, as reptiles will do,” said Grosvenor. “But here they await us openly, like sprouting fruit.” He turned to Rose. “Take your egg, as agreed, as well as your man, and go.”
Rose didn’t budge. “Thank you, Mr. Grosvenor. I’d be happy to oblige except for one thing. It occurs to me that in any litter, there’s always a runt. How do I know this egg isn’t a runt?”
“I cannot warranty anything,” said Grosvenor. “You may take whichever egg you prefer. We must hurry.” He surveyed the surrounding woods in anxiety. Somewhere out there, in the night, the thing was helpless from its ordeal—but as with the other factors, he could not guarantee for how long.
“Well now,” said Rose, “it’s difficult to choose one egg from another. I mean, when you’re raising and training pups, you need to take the pick of the whole litter. But with hen’s eggs, that decision can’t be made until they’re hatched. I believe I’m going to have to take them all to be sure.”
The barrel of the pistol pointed toward Grosvenor’s chest. “Oh,” he added, “I’ll be relieving you of that gold nugget too.”
Grosvenor stood; fists balled at his sides. “You’re nothing but a highwayman.”
“I’m a lot of things, Mr. Grosvenor. And a rich man is what I intend to be.”
Rose moved toward the clutch of eggs, pulling the rope connecting Minerva and Lyman. Impulsively Grosvenor lurched to interject himself.
Too late he noticed the insidious ring around the eggs. The soil there, more air than earth, dissolved beneath their soles, and like driven stakes the four dropped straight into the ground. Rose’s pistol flew away and the lantern spilled. The surrounding dirt raced to fill the vacuum around their bodies, pinning them tight.
For some minutes each of them struggled and shouted, trapped in their personal oubliettes. The three men wriggled desperately, their arms trapped at their sides, chins level with the eggs, three throats shouting a chorus compounded into a medicine of nonsense. Only Minerva made any advance, for she had thrown up her hands over her head as she fell. As her wrists were bound, she had little success digging, and instead only progressed by thrusting her elbows into the dirt before her and shimmying upwards by scant inches before resetting and repeating. In her palms she still held Bitty’s medallion, which she had carried with her the whole night.
She was the first to hear the scratching. She froze, leaning all her attention toward that sound, and one by one the others likewise halted as they grew aware of the insistent chipping noise.
Among the clutch, an egg cracked and a piece of the shell tore off. A reptilian beak poked out.
How clever is the trap, Minerva wondered just then, when the wolf doesn’t even realize he’s been caught? No ruse is more cunning than the one in which the flimflammed doesn’t recognize the swindle. For just as the artist’s character might be intuited by scrutinizing the brushstrokes and composition of his paintings, so too the transcendentalists believed something of God’s nature could be intuited by studying His Creation.
Yet in turn they were studied as well, except not by God. It occurred to Minerva they were understood by their deeds and their actions and, most of all, by their words. Each of them brought there to that precise place, at that specific time, lured by greed or ambition or indebtedness or threat. And Minerva, what had brought her there? Some combination of curiosity, love both daughterly and otherwise, and yes, suspicion—but there isn’t a single sphinx’s riddle in this world that wasn’t untangled by suspicion. The bait varied by the fish, but each of them hooked nonetheless, and deposited on the riverbank.
To be eaten.
So consumed were they by the panic of the moment, none of the four understood their predicament until that firstborn hatchling slid from its slimy bed, full of claws and a hungry snapping mouth. It was joined by a second and a third, and within minutes only a singular egg remained intact. The mass of them yowled and snipped until finally they discovered the means of locomotion, and they crawled from their crib toward the milk provided them.
Deep beyond her vision, tumblers fell into place, each syllable like the tooth of a key, opening a lock. For a split-second Minerva felt an attention shifted onto her and her alone, and with rising dread she understood that focus to be equally malicious or benign according to its mood. Such was a tendency shared by everything on this planet—by beast and storm, by plant and stone—and which determined, often unpredictably and arbitrarily, whether we stood at the end of each day whole and successful or maimed and injured, or even dead.
Her initiation into the mystery was complete. “Hobomoko,” Minerva said.
Free to the waist, Minerva leaned toward Lyman. She pressed Bitty’s medallion into
